Explicating Erdogan

Rod Nordland’s New York Times story reporting that Egypt’s security forces killed 36 Islamists in their custody on Sunday also carries a quote from Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Nordland notes that Erdogan had given “a blistering speech in support of the Muslim Brotherhood” and “likened Egypt’s military leader, General Sisi, to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria” on Saturday. Nordland then offers this quote from Erdogan’s Saturday speech: “There are currently two paths in Egypt: those who follow the pharaoh, and those who follow Moses.”

Leaving aside what political correctness does not allow acknowledgment of — i.e., that much of the original, tolerant Medinan phase Islam is taken from Judaism — Islam also claims Moses (Musa) as its own prophet (ditto Jesus). The idea is that the Jews became unfaithful to the “real” teaching of Moses, blah, blah, blah.

In perfect symmetry, Islamic supremacists from the Blind Sheikh, to Zawahiri, to Qaradawi, to the Brotherhood, have always referred to Mubarak as “the pharaoh.” As I’ve been arguing for a number of years, Erdogan is the most important Islamic-supremacist political official in the world (which is why it’s so shameful for the U.S. to camouflage him as a “moderate” — something I wish I could say was just an Obama problem — it actually goes back to 2003). So Sisi is being framed as Mubarak’s successor. It’s actually even more sinister than it appears at first blush. All this proceeds from the theory of Sayyid Qutb (followed by the Blind Sheikh when he issued a fatwa calling for Sadat’s murder) that the ruler who fails to rule according to sharia must be opposed and, if necessary, killed.